Friday, January 02, 2015

Dead to rights

I'm sorry, but this little morality play doesn't seem (to me) to say anything nearly as much about "gun control" or "Second Amendment rights" as much as it does "You're never as fucking smart as you fucking think you are so you need to plan for that".

Because there's really only two ways I can see this playing out:

1. Li'l Jocko reaches into Mommy's "specially designed" pistol-carry purse, extracts her hogleg, jacks back the slide, releases it, takes up a solid, two-handed firing position and puts a round into Mommy's brain housing group (all without Mommy either seeing him do all this or hearing the sound of the automatic pistol action being worked - an unmistakeable noise for someone who was supposed to be all Miss Idaho NRA as the mommy-target is said to have been) or

2. Now-deceased rocket scientist was wandering around Wally Mart with a freaking round under the hammer in violation of every common-sense rule on firearms safety ever thought up and Rule Number Zero for any sort of firearm, thus allowing her sprog to simply slip the bullet-launcher out of her clutch and put one in her ten-ring, easy-peasy.

Believe #1 if you dare, but I gotta go with #2. Which pretty much goes to show you that you can be a valedictorian, scientist, wife, mother, and firearms aficianado, and if you fuck up Rule Number Zero for a tenth of a nanosecond chances are you'll wind up dead as mutton.

Which, in turn, reminds me again that waaaayyyyy too many people can get their little paddy-paws on firearms who shouldn't go out in public with anything more lethal than a fucking licorice whip.

That's my real problem with "Second Amendment Solutions"; because the First Amendment of Not Getting Fucking Shot is that you never forget that the most dangerous weapon is the one closest to you, i.e., the one in your own hands. You ignore that, or forget that, or pretend that it's not true and you become more dangerous to yourself and everyone around you than the maddest lunatic jihadi suicide commando who ever graduated magnum cum madrassi.

6 comments:

I wanted to keep the original spelling, Leon, so the thing would be immediately identifiable...

And this Darwin-award-winning thing just comes back to my problems with the whole open carry crowd and the notion of strolling about in civilian spaces locked and loaded.

Soldiers - who go armed in combat for good reasons - have strict rules about things like safeties and loading rounds because of Rule Number Zero ("The most dangerous weapon is the one closest to you"). Soldiers ALSO are conscious of their weapon at every moment because, well, it's the main point of what they're doing.

But civilians aren't, and can't. Civil life is just too busy, too crowded, and too distracting. Unless you're some sort of physiokinetic genius you CAN'T be aware of your weapon all the time. And that is how stuff like this happens.

It's not an "if" but a "when", and when you add a heap of careless (like purchasing a handgun without a safety and walking around with a round in the chamber) on top, well...let's just say that Mommy is getting a whole big block of remedial gun safety lectures in Heaven (or Hell, or whereever...) because she failed to heed Rule Number Zero.

You pretty much expressed my thoughts. Accidents will happen and there are situations, like this one, where the likelihood goes way up. I can't figure out how to say anything else without sounding ugly.

Thing is...I enjoy going to the range, and used to hunt (I have no one who will hunt with me now and know better than to hunt alone...). I've owned either a rifle or shotgun or both the better part of my adult life. I'm not some sort of crazed "gun-grabber".

But, shit, man...I don't and never have seen the point in wandering around civilian life armed. For one thing, I'm a grouchy asshole with a temper and if I strapped myself I'd be waaayyyy too tempted to pistol-whip some other asshole or worse when they got up in my face. For another, like I said; if you carry a weapon you're fucking obligated to positively control that weapon at all times. ALL times. So you don't get to lounge around Starbucks with the thing in your pocket; I've dropped my cell phone far too many times to pretend that a pocket or a holster is perfectly secure. You don't get to leave it in your car, or in your handbag and said handbag on the table when you go to pickup your drinks.

Frankly, that's too much goddamn irritation for the supposed payoff when I get to crush some crime, assuming that I can actually figure out what the crime is and who's doing it (hardly a given, seeing the number of mistaken-identity shootings by trained police officers...) AND get my weapon into action AND hit the target with my pulse at 115 and the tunnel-vision brought on by adrenaline stress...